When a doctor told Jerome Bouvier that he would never stand up again, never take another single step, he didn't cry.

His mom, his brother and his nurse were all in the hospital room and it was they who shed the tears.

Bouvier only asked for a few hours alone.

Not long after, in the months following a 1983 water skiing accident that smashed his spine and paralyzed him from the chest down, he sat in a wheelchair for the first time.

He didn't cry then, either. He put the chair into a wheelie and roared around the hospital ward. He was OK with it.

"I took it. I just accepted it," said Bouvier, who is the recipient of the Courage to Come Back Award in the addictions category.

After that, he went back to his life. He was 23 and he returned to the California racetrack where he trained Standardbred horses. He mucked stalls in his wheelchair and drove horses on the track from a buggy he designed.

He did this despite being told he would have to get a desk job.

"I was exploring [the wheelchair]. I was wondering what the hell this was all about," he said.

"I fell down stairs. I was dragged through bushes by horses. I was in accidents. I did all kinds of weird stuff. Everything was different and I explored every aspect of that.

"I went right back to what I was doing before I got hurt. I just did it sitting down all the time."

And part of that was returning to using drugs -namely cocaine and at an alarming rate. He puts it like this: Cocaine was his best friend, there to celebrate the good times and there to help survive the bad times.

And it was with him the day he was injured. He had been partying at a river shore with friends in California, not far from Sacramento, where he was working at a racetrack.

"We were flying up and down the river," he recalled. "The river T-eed, the boat went left, I went straight, the ski caught and shot me out. I somersaulted across the river and crashed into the rocks."

He'd been using drugs since he was a teen in Manitoba, when he wanted to fit in and join the cool kids.

Later, four-day cocaine binges were common. He would run six kilometres in the heat until he passed out. He took up stripping on weekends for extra cash and because it was fun.

For Bouvier, now 52, life was extreme -until a combination of experiences made him think that cocaine wasn't the friend he thought it was.

His withdrawal from drugs was years long and gradual. He never attended meetings or entered rehabilitation. He doesn't know any specific dates and is offended by the term "clean" because it implies he was dirty.

A year-and-a-half out of hospital, Bouvier got a strange phone call from a friend who was a heroin addict who had been trying to kick his habit.

Bouvier went to his house to check on him and found him passed out between the fridge and wall, needles and heroin strewn about.

He looked around. He saw a set of feet sticking out from under the bed. It was the man's teenage daughter. She'd fatally overdosed on heroin.

"I threw myself out of my chair, dragged myself over and pulled her out from underneath the bed. She was purple," he said.

He remembers shouting at her, "You can't go!" And he remembers the paramedics simply stopping their efforts to revive her.

"She stays with me everywhere I go. Her eyes -when I look, I always see them," he said.

That didn't stop him from using but it was a step forward. He became a media darling at U.S. racetracks. Everyone wanted to write about and photograph the wheelchair-bound horse trainer, who would hose down his wheels every night so his chair wouldn't smell of manure.

It was through that publicity that two kids from Delaware sought him out for a conversation. They shared experiences over a few hours and when they left, one said to him: "You should be doing something else with your life."

Another step.

Bouvier finally walked away from his best friend in the late '80s. He was in a Garden State Park New York tack room talking with a friend about getting cocaine and he thought: "I can't do this any more."

In the years that followed, he worked racing in Quebec, finished his highschool education, moved back to B.C. and graduated in 1991 from Douglas College with a degree in the Child and Youth Care Counselling program.

He was the director of a youth crisis intervention program in California for five years before he took over as executive director of PoCoMo Youth Services Society, an outreach program for troubled teens in the Tri-Cities.

He works on a shoestring budget, is constantly applying for grants and asking for money because he has no core funding. It's important work, he says. He just wishes someone would notice and relieve some financial pressure.

"Twelve to 18 is the forgotten population. We're losing kids," he says. "It's not OK."

He says he's been blessed to have two perspectives in one lifetime.

"[I was] a middle-class white boy, standing up, had the whole world in front of me. Didn't know what racism was, didn't know what discrimination was," he said.

"And then to do it from a chair? All of a sudden I was less than, I was excluded, not able to get into places."

He says that next to life's wounds are gifts and he's learned many things about the power of the human spirit.

"The power is inside ourselves to stand up to adversity, to move forward," he said. "I think a lot of us forget that and sometimes we have to be reminded that we are powerful."

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